Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday May 17, 2011 @10:43AM
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed dept.

rubycodez writes "After being thrown out on the streets by Attachmate, the purchasers of Novell, Miguel De Icaza has formed a new company Xamarin to make .NET development tools for Android and iOS. The company will also provide commercial international Mono support. There are those who would say Mono poses a risk of drawing Microsoft patent or other IP litigation for its inclusion in some major Linux distributions, and that these recent events might be the beginning of the demise of widespread use of Mono and other .NETiness in open source software, a good thing."

This brings on the specter of legal action by Attachmate. While there has always been the thought that Mono could be sued by Microsoft, such as lawsuit would require Microsoft convincing a court that it was “just kidding” and the CLR/C# patent covenants are non-binding. Between their obligations to the ECMA standards body and the legal principal of equitable estoppel, the chance of this happening is slim to none.
Attachmate is a completely different story. Even if they aren’t supporting it, they do own a product that is in direct competition with Xamarin’s future offerings. Without some sort of legal arrangement between Attachmate and Xamarin, the latter would face the daunting prospect of proving that their new development doesn’t use any the technology that the old one did.
As a result of this, as well as the general uncertainty of any new product, some developers on the mono-android mailing list are stating that they are moving back to Java development for now.
Source: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/Mono-II [infoq.com]

I'm not going to lie. I know nothing about C# other than the blindingly obvious, i.e., it is compiled bytecode designed to run in a virtual machine, it does automatic garbage collection, and it appears to be the premier platform for MS development. I'm pretty well versed in Python and Javascript and I've learned Java to code for Android. I really like Python and with Psycho, it runs plenty fast. And since the GUI widget toolkits like tk are compiled natively just exposing bindings to Python, the graphical presentation of applications doesn't feel slow at all (unlike Swing *ducks*). I kind of like Java too and development for Android is a breeze. Personally, I'd never use Java anywhere that Python would suffice but that is just because Python, at least to me, is so good, i.e., I think it and it almost writes itself. So, my question is this, what is so great about C# that people seem willing to practically move heaven and earth to shoehorn it in to every platform they can get their hands on. Why would I want to use mono when I can use Eclipse+Android SDK which is positively sweet. I don't get it.

The new versions of.NET for the iPhone and Android will be source compatible with MonoTouch and Mono for Android. Like those versions, they will be commercial products, built on top of the open core Mono.